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By Erica GoodeTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Monday December 17, 2012 7:00 AM

It comes in black, tan and camouflage. A pink version once was raffled by a gun store to raise
money for breast-cancer research.

Favored by target shooters and by hunters who stalk small game and sometimes deer, its
customizable features — stocks, grips, sights, barrel lengths — are discussed endlessly by
enthusiasts in online forums. It ranks high among firearms purchased for self-defense.

But the AR-15-style rifle — the most-popular rifle in America, according to gun dealers — also
was the weapon of choice for Adam Lanza, the police said, who used one made by Bushmaster on Friday
to kill 20 young children and six adults in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The increasing appearance of the rifle in rampage killings — police officials say an AR-15 was
used by James E. Holmes, who is accused of opening fire and killing 12 people in a movie theater in
Colorado in July, and by Jacob Roberts, who killed two people and then took his own life in a
shopping mall near Portland, Ore., last week — has rekindled the debate about its availability and
its appeal to killers bent on slaughter.

Gun-control advocates contend that semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 — the civilian version
of the military’s M-16 and M-4 — are a logical choice for anyone whose goal is to kill a lot of
people in a short time, because of their ability to fire multiple high-velocity rounds rapidly.

“The people we’re talking about, once they get into ‘I want to kill a lot of people,’ it’s not a
leap for them to see that these guns are made and designed for war,” said Tom Diaz, a senior policy
analyst at the Violence Policy Center.

AR-15s are not the only weapons used by rampaging shooters. Semi-automatic handguns also are
employed frequently. In Newtown, in addition to the Bushmaster carbine, two handguns were found at
the scene, a 10 mm Glock and a 9 mm Sig Sauer, although the rifle is what Lanza used, spraying up
to 11 bullets into each victim’s body, according to the medical examiner. All three guns belonged
to his mother, officials said.

In Colorado, Holmes carried two Glock handguns and a shotgun, officials said, as well as the
AR-15. A Glock and a Walther were used by Seung-hui Cho to kill 32 people and injure 17 at Virginia
Tech in 2007.

Some advocates have argued for banning assault rifles, although some also acknowledge that the
federal assault-weapons ban, which expired in 2004, was inadequate and largely ineffective.

Defenders cite statistics indicating that unlike handguns or shotguns, rifles of any type
account for only a fraction of homicides in the United States — out of 12,664 murder victims last
year, 323 were killed with rifles, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

What neither side questions is the popularity of AR-15s, which dealers say fairly leap off the
shelves.

Enthusiasts praise the AR-15 rifle as lightweight, durable, accurate and, compared with other
long guns, gentle in its kick. They describe the rifle as a gadget geek’s dream — the “Barbie doll”
of firearms, as one gun dealer described it — because of an array of accessories that allow it to
be customized easily.

In a 2011 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, dealers reported that 49.1 percent
of the AR-15-style rifles they sold were for target shooting.